2016-03-20

Spouse finally got me to climb the ladder to do something about the Isopoles on the end of the house. I've got both the 2-m and 70-cm versions with a diplexer (band-pass filter) feeding them into the radio room. Since they've been up, I've never really been happy with their performance. I eventually stuck an Arrow Antennas GP146/440 up to replace them and just used the Isopoles for the scanners.

So when I got up the ladder and got all the dead vines away, I opened up the plastic box that holds the diplexer to start disconnecting things. First thing I noticed was that one of the PL-259s, the one on the VHF port, was loose. No big deal. Hmm, which antenna does this feed again? Maybe that's the problem. Hey, look! It's connected to the UHF Isopole. And naturally, the UHF port was connected to the VHF antenna.